Haruki Murakami - South of the Border, West of the Sun

Shortly after our first child was born, a postcard came, forwarded to me from my parents’ home. It was a notice of a funeral, with a woman’s name on it. She’d died when she was thirty-six. But I couldn’t place the name. The card was postmarked Nagoya. I didn’t know a soul in Nagoya. After a while, though, I realized who the woman was: Izumi’s cousin who used to live in Kyoto. I’d completely forgotten her name. Her parents’ home, it turned out, was in Nagoya.

It didn’t take much to figure out that Izumi herself had sent the card to me. No one else would have. At first, though, her reason was a mystery. But after reading it over several times, I could sense the unforgiving coldness that had gone into it. Izumi never forgot what I had done, and never forgave me. She must have been living a miserable life—a contented woman would never have sent that card. Or if she did, she would have written a word or two of explanation.

The cousin and everything about her came rushing back to me. Her room, her body, the passionate sex we shared. But the total clarity these memories once had for me was gone, like smoke blown away on the wind. I couldn’t imagine why she had died. Thirty-six is such an unnatural age to die. Her last name was the same as before, which meant she never married—or had and divorced.

I found out more about Izumi and her whereabouts from an old high school classmate of mine. He’d read a “Tokyo Bar Guide” feature in the magazine Brutus , seen my photo in the spread, and learned that I was running the two bars in Aoyama. One evening he came over to where I was sitting at the counter and said, Hey, man, how’s it going? No implication that he’d gone out of his way to see me. He just happened to be drinking with some of his buddies and came over to say hi.

“I’ve been to this bar many times,” he said. “It’s near my office. But I had no idea you were the owner. What a small world.”

In high school I was sort of the outsider, but he had good grades, played sports, and was the type you’d find in student government. He was a pleasant sort, never pushy. An altogether nice guy. He was on the soccer team and had been big to begin with, but now he’d put on a bit of a spread: a double chin, his three-piece suit straining at the seams. All due to entertaining clients all the time, he explained. Big companies are hell on wheels, he said. You’ve got overtime, entertaining clients, job transfers; do a bad job and they kick your butt, meet your quota and they’ll up and raise it. Not the kind of thing decent people should be into. His office, it turned out, was in Aoyama 1-chome, just down the street.

We talked about things you’d expect classmates to talk about when they hadn’t seen each other for eighteen years—our jobs, marriage, how many kids we had, mutual acquaintances we’d run into. That’s when he mentioned Izumi.

“There was a girl you were going out with then. You were always together. Something-or-other Ohara.”

“Izumi Ohara,” I said.

“Right, right,” he said. “Izumi Ohara. You know, I ran into her not long ago.”

“In Tokyo?” I asked, startled.

“No, not in Tokyo. In Toyohashi.”

“Toyohashi?” I said, even more surprised. “You mean Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t get it. Why did you meet Izumi in Toyohashi? What in the world would she be doing there?”

It seemed he caught something hard and unyielding in my voice. “I don’t know why,” he ventured. “I just saw her there. But there’s not much to tell. I’m not even completely sure it was her.”

He ordered another Wild Turkey on the rocks. I was drinking a vodka gimlet.

“I don’t care if there’s not much to tell. I want to know.”

“Well …” He hesitated. “What I mean is, sometimes I feel like it didn’t actually take place. It’s a spooky feeling, like I was dreaming but it was real, you know? It’s hard to explain.”

“But it really did happen, right?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then tell me.”

He gave a nod of resignation and took a sip of his Wild Turkey.

“I went to Toyohashi because my younger sister lives there. I was on a business trip to Nagoya, and it was a Friday, so I decided to go over to her place to spend the night. And that’s where I met Izumi. She was in the elevator of my sister’s apartment building. I was thinking: Wow, this woman’s the spitting image of that Ohara girl. But then I thought: No way, can’t be. No way I’d meet her in an elevator in my sister’s apartment building, in Toyohashi of all places. Her face looked different from before. I don’t understand, myself, why I soon realized it was her. Instinct I guess.”

“But it was Izumi, right?”

He nodded. “She happened to live on the same floor as my sister. We got off together and walked down the corridor in the same direction. She went into the apartment two doors before my sister’s. I was curious and checked out the nameplate on her door. Ohara, it said.”

“Did she notice you?”

He shook his head. “We were in the same class, but we never really talked. And besides, I’ve put on over forty pounds since then. She’d never recognize me.”

“But was it really Izumi? I wonder. Ohara’s a pretty common name. And there must be other people who look like her.”

“Yeah, I was wondering the same thing, so I asked my sister. About what kind of person this Ohara was. My sister showed me the list of tenants’ names. You know, those lists they make up when they’ve got to divide the cost of repainting or something. All the tenants’ names were on it And there it was—Izumi Ohara. With Izumi in katakana, not Chinese characters. There can’t be that many with the same combination, right?”

“Which means she’s still single.”

“My sister didn’t know anything about that,” he said. “Izumi Ohara is the apartment house’s mystery woman, I found out. No one had ever spoken with her. If you say hello to her as you pass in the corridor, she ignores you. She doesn’t answer the bell when you ring. Not exactly about to be voted Most Popular on the Block.”

“That can’t be her.” I laughed and shook my head. “Izumi isn’t that kind of person. She was always outgoing, always smiling.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it was someone else,” he said. “Someone with exactly the same name. Let’s change the subject.”

“But the Izumi Ohara there was living alone?”

“I think so. Nobody’s ever seen any men go into her place. Nobody has a clue what she does for a living. It’s a complete riddle.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“‘Bout what?”

“About her . About this Izumi Ohara who may or may not be someone with the same name. You saw her face in the elevator. What did you think? Did she look all right?”

He pondered that. “All right, I suppose,” he answered.

“How do you mean, all right?”

He shook his whiskey glass; it made a clinking sound. “Naturally, she’s aged a bit. She’s thirty-six, after all. You and me too. Your metabolism slows down. You put on a few pounds. Can’t be a high school student forever.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Why don’t we change the subject? It must have been somebody else.”

I sighed. Resting both arms on the counter, I looked him straight in the face. “Look, I want to know. I have to know. Just before we left high school, Izumi and I broke up. It was ugly. I screwed up and hurt her a lot. Since then, I’ve never had a way of finding out how she is. I had no idea where she was or what she was doing. So just tell me the unvarnished truth. It was Izumi, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “If you put it that way, yes, it was definitely her. I’m sorry to have to tell you, though.”